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U.S. Government Plans Overhaul in Disaster Aid

In Bay St. Louis, Miss., the Army Corps of Engineers supervised hurricane cleanup. Changes will encourage local governments to arrange the work.Credit
Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times

WASHINGTON, July 23 — The Department of Homeland Security, responding to months of criticism and ridicule, is revamping several of its core disaster relief programs, enacting changes that will include sharply cutting emergency cash assistance for victims of major disasters, and more carefully controlling access to free hotel rooms.

Immediate emergency aid would not exceed $500 under the new rules, instead of the $2,000 per family previously allowed. And it would be handed out only after identities and addresses were checked. Such precautions were not taken consistently last year after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, an oversight auditors said led to fraud and abuse of up to $1.4 billion.

Separately, federal officials are working with Louisiana leaders to complete an evacuation plan for the southeastern part of the state that would involve a level of federal deployment greater than previously provided in advance of a hurricane or natural disaster. The goal is to help provide emergency transportation for as many as 96,000 people who do not have vehicles.

“There were an awful lot of lessons we learned last year,” said David Garratt, a deputy director at the Federal Emergency Management Agency, in an interview on Friday. The agency operates under the auspices of the Homeland Security Department.

Details of the proposed evacuation plan for Louisiana were laid out in a separate letter sent last week by Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff to Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco of Louisiana.

“Because of the extensive devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina and the persisting vulnerabilities throughout southeastern Louisiana, the federal government stands ready to meet your requests,” Mr. Chertoff’s letter said.

The changes in the evacuation, disaster response and recovery strategies are to be formally announced Monday, but hints of several of the measures began to surface in Washington late last week, drawing some cautious words of praise.

“These sound like positive changes,” said Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine and chairwoman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. “We need more details to know if it will work.”

But some housing advocates and emergency management officials questioned whether the revised system would be too inflexible to get aid quickly to victims.

Requiring families to register with FEMA before moving into hotels from makeshift shelters could create a hardship, said Shanna L. Smith, president of the National Fair Housing Alliance, based in Washington.

“It sounds like we are trusting the government too much to be able to put something in place that quickly,” she said. “Certainly there are some people who may have lied about being from the disaster zone. But to punish a large group of people for the behavior of a few seems quite harsh to me.”

An estimated 800,000 of the 1.2 million people who fled southeastern Louisiana last year — before and after Hurricane Katrina — have returned. Of that population, federal officials estimate nearly 96,000 may not be able to evacuate on their own should another storm strike.

In his letter to Governor Blanco, Mr. Chertoff said the federal government was prepared to move as many as 80,000 people by bus from collection points to inland shelters.

Separately, the federal government says it is prepared to move as many as 46,000 people by air and 15,000 by train, the letter says.

Photo

Emergency debit cards worth
$2,000 were handed out last year;
such aid will be limited to $500.Credit
Richard Carson/Reuters

To make the plan work, the federal government must have a list of collection points and an accurate count of how many patients at nursing homes and hospitals might need transportation or require care in special medical shelters, Mr. Chertoff’s letter said. It asks the state to turn over such a tally by Wednesday.

Unlike the new evacuation strategy for Louisiana, the changes being proposed for other Homeland Security Department programs will apply to disasters or emergencies nationwide, officials said. The revised programs will come in the form of what officials will call a new set of “recovery strategies” that govern emergency shelters, temporary housing and debris removal.

Under the plan, the factors that initiate immediate cash assistance will not change. It will be offered if an event forces a huge and probably long-term relocation of people. But the process that governs how the money is distributed will change.

Most important, officials said, emergency cash assistance will be granted only after FEMA officials have used computer records to ensure applicants are not repeatedly signing up for aid, or using false Social Security numbers or fabricated addresses. The aid will be provided only after an affected state signs off on the program and agrees to cover 25 percent of the benefit.

And immediate, unrestricted assistance will be limited to $500 rather than $2,000. Registration with FEMA, which includes identity verification, will also be required before someone is allowed to check into a federally financed hotel room, another step that was not taken last year.

Without similar protections in place last summer, Congressional auditors have estimated, $600 million to $1.4 billion of the $5.4 billion in assistance given to victims of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita may have been based on fraudulent, inaccurate or improper claims, and an unknown number of hotel rooms were provided to people who were not hurricane victims.

Mark C. Smith, a spokesman for Louisiana’s emergency management agency, said the $500 cap might save money, but it could also leave some victims with serious needs.

“Five hundred dollars is really not a lot of money, especially if it is for a family,” he said.

Aaron T. Walker, a FEMA spokesman, said that agency officials, in extraordinary situations, would be allowed to approve additional $500 emergency assistance grants, and families would continue to be eligible for other longer-term federal and FEMA aid.

For temporary housing, direct payments will be made to landlords. This step is meant to address a major criticism raised by housing advocates and municipal officials last year: that FEMA’s confusing and often changing rules delayed victims’ moves into apartments.

After Hurricane Katrina, FEMA sent out $786-per-month rent checks to hundreds of thousands of families. But in cities like Houston, where tens of thousands of evacuees assembled, some families spent the money on other needs; others had a hard time finding an apartment, or finding a landlord willing to rent to them without federal assurances.

Mr. Garratt, the FEMA official, said the agency would work with local and state officials in advance to identify available apartments or homes, and then offer to pay the rent directly. That would eliminate the need for a financially complicated system like the one ultimately set up in Houston, where the city paid rent for 34,000 families and then sought reimbursement from the federal government.

“This should be a far more organized and disciplined way of handling this,” Mr. Garratt said.

Assuming FEMA has the capacity to manage the program — which Mr. Garratt said he was convinced that it does — Jim Arbury, a senior vice president at the National Multi Housing Council, a trade group in Washington, said the new approach would be a major improvement.

“It makes so much more sense,” he said.

But it will also mean tighter control over who can move into a federally financed apartment, and when they must move out. Advocates for victims of Hurricane Katrina have argued that the government has already been too strict on both issues.

The changes include a revised debris removal policy. Local and state governments will be encouraged to arrange debris removal contracts in advance, with FEMA setting up a registry of companies to do the job.